Villa Air-Bel - The Second World War, Escape and a House in France

Villa Air-Bel - The Second World War, Escape and a House in France

by Rosemary Sullivan

John Murray, HK$170

Among the 'Righteous among the Nations' at Israel's Yad Vashem is a Harvard scholar named Varian Fry who was personally responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of Jewish writers and artists who might otherwise not have survived the Nazi era. Fry was sent to Marseilles early in the second world war by a New York group called the American Emergency Rescue Committee. It gave him a list of people, a chequebook and a book of rules to fight his way through US officialdom. The Villa Air-Bel was a chateau outside Marseilles where the likes of Andre Breton and Max Ernst were hidden during their escape across the Pyrenees into Spain or into Switzerland or to Casablanca. Jane Stevenson, reviewing Villa Air-Bel for The Daily Telegraph, describes it as 'a magnificent, complex narrative of courage, folly and complacency' about 'an enterprise that, on the one side, involved human bravery and integrity on a scale seldom surpassed and, on the other, bureaucracy and purblind human stupidity on a level that would make the angels weep'. Rosemary Sullivan beautifully narrates the stories of the many acts of heroism, big and small, that helped save a succession of brilliant people.